TEU Tertiary Update, volume 12, number 33

OUR BEST WISHES TO SAMOA, INDONESIA AND OUR OTHER PACIFIC NEIGHBOURS

Our thoughts at the TEU today are with the people of Samoa, Indonesia and other nearby Pacific islands as they face the aftermath of their respective tragedies. If you want to help you can make donations to the Red Cross online or by calling 0900 31 100 to make an automatic $20 donation, or by visiting any Westpac or ANZ bank branch.

DRAFT STRATEGY WARNS OF FUNDING DROUGHT

The minister of education Anne Tolley’s Draft Tertiary Education Strategy 2010-2015 has emphasised that the government intends to ‘exercise restraint on its spending’ during the term of the strategy.

It states government expenditure on tertiary education in New Zealand has increased at an average rate of around 6 percent a year in real terms since 2000. However, with the current tight fiscal environment, the government will be unable to provide significant funding increases to meet the growing demand for tertiary education.

Instead the strategy proposes to focus funding on areas that the government sees as best contributing to economic growth:

“We will need to move funding away from low-quality qualifications (such as those with low completion rates or poor educational or labour market outcomes) to fund growth in high-quality qualifications that benefit New Zealanders and contribute to economic growth.”

The strategy indicates that one of the central measures of high value public investment in tertiary education will be an improvement in student completion rates.

Providers will be directed to ‘seek efficiency gains, ensure the qualifications they offer best meet student and employer needs and explore additional sources of revenue’.

While the strategy says that the government is committed to maintaining reasonable fees for students, it will also explore ways of giving providers ‘some additional flexibility’ to raise revenue.

You can read more about the Draft Tertiary Education Strategy at the Government’s Beehive website: http://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/consultation+tertiary+strategy

ALSO IN TERTIARY UPDATE THIS WEEK:

1. Draft strategy warns of funding drought
2. Tertiary institutes follow market signals
3. Firms to have greater say in public research
4. Where are all the academics going?
5. Open Country Cheese attracts international opprobrium
6. Ako Aotearoa wants more reflective teaching
7. UK Universities face fines for too many students

TERTIARY INSTITUTIONS TO FOLLOW MARKET SIGNALS

The minister of education, Anne Tolley, is calling for greater incentives for tertiary education providers to respond better to students and market signals in her draft tertiary education strategy released this week.

The strategy wants individual providers and industry training organisations to make much more information available to the public about how they are performing. It aims to allow students and employers to make informed decisions about tertiary education, and create an incentive for providers and industry training organisations to improve performance.

“As well as publishing the findings of external reviews of providers, we will make other provider performance information available to students, including retention and completion rates, and information on the employment outcomes of study.”

The strategy then proposes that institutions’ funding be more directly linked to how well they meet the demands of students and employers.

TEU national secretary Sharn Riggs says the ‘market signals’ strategy fails to take into account that tertiary education is a democratic tool that exposes over 600,000 New Zealanders to new ideas, new people and new chances.

“The appendix of the strategy notes that tertiary education has important non-market related outcomes such as better general well-being, better health and greater social mobility, promotion of democracy, freedom of thought, and enrichment of culture including ahuatanga Māori and tikanga Māori promotion. However when it comes to action rather than words the government simply wants to move as quickly as possible to link more funding to market signals.”

FIRMS TO HAVE GREATER SAY IN PUBLIC RESEARCH

The Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) will be amended to better meet the demands of private firms if advice in the government’s draft tertiary education strategy is adopted.

The strategy notes that while PBRF has been successful in promoting quality improvements, it is not adequately helping the economy to grow. The strategy states that public investment in research on its own does not drive economic growth: it is firms that translate public research into profit.

“Better linkages between firms, universities and other public research organisations will inform firms of the research that may be relevant to them, and inform researchers of the research that firms want and need. We will ensure that the Performance-Based Research Fund assessment fully recognises research of direct relevance to the needs of industry and its dissemination to industry. We will also ensure there are further incentives for universities, other research organisations and firms to work together.”

TEU president Tom Ryan is warning however that this approach risks devaluing all other fields of research that thousands of academics are engaged in.

“The government is saying with one hand that it has no money to spend. But with the other hand it is going to create specific incentives for researchers who engage in the type of research that firms want. The implications are pretty grim for researchers working in non-commercially applicable areas, in blue skies research, or even in research that might affect some companies’ practice negatively (such as environmental research). We would hope any changes to the PBRF are more inclusive in the final tertiary education strategy.”

WHERE ARE ALL THE ACADEMICS GOING?

Planning is under way to prevent a future staffing shortage across New Zealand universities as traditional sources for academic staff dry up at the same time as a large proportion of the academic workforce retires.

The Academic Workforce Planning - Towards 2020 is a collaborative project across the eight New Zealand universities. It has received funding under the Tertiary Education Commission's Priorities for Focus Fund and is an initiative of the New Zealand Vice Chancellor's Committee. A steering committee to lead the project has been appointed, and includes TEU’s immediate past president Maureen Montgomery. Steering Committee chair Kevin Seales says the traditional off-shore sources of academic staff are decreasing and New Zealand staff are also being attracted into other sectors as well as overseas.

Members of the existing academic workforce will soon be retiring at a higher rate than ever before experienced.

"With this situation in mind the overall aim of the project is to develop a workforce plan that quantifies the supply of and demand for academic staffing within New Zealand's universities and identifies strategies to address any issues towards 2020," said Mr Seales.

A subsequent project will be considered which would look at planning issues related to the non-academic staff workforce.

TEU national secretary Sharn Riggs endorsed the project but told Radio New Zealand that chronic underfunding is the main reason why it is tough for New Zealand universities to attract top academics.

“The government pulling $50 million of funding agreed as part of previous tripartite negotiations in the last budget is simply going to exacerbate that problem. I think having the workforce planning committee is a really good idea. It is important to look towards the future. But, at the end of the day, if we don’t address the funding issue we are constantly going to be falling behind, not only losing our good people to overseas universities, but we will not be able to attract new people into New Zealand universities.”

OPEN COUNTRY CHEESE ATTRACTS INTERNATIONAL OPPROBRIUM

The International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF) has launched an online campaign calling on New Zealand’s Open Country Cheese company to end its lockout and desist from intimidating its workers from joining a union.

Open Country Cheese locked out its Waikato workers for six weeks for seeking a collective agreement with basic redundancy and transfer of undertakings protection. After having the employment court rule the lockout illegal Open Country Cheese then suspended 36 of the workers instead. The company maintains that all workers are suspended pending an investigation of alleged sabotage, though neither the union nor any of its members have received suspension letters and the union strenuously denied any involvement in alleged sabotage.

The Dairy Workers Union has not been involved in a strike for 20 years. Dairy Workers Union national secretary James Ritchie outlines the moderate claims the workers are seeking:

“There is no wage claim on the table. Workers are seeking a collective agreement which protects them from being made temporary or casual at any time. They want a say on how their rosters and hours of work can be changed so their family lives are not disrupted without notice and consultation. They want temp workers to be paid the same rate for the job after 3 months. They want temp workers to be made permanent after 11 months service. They want redundancy compensation if made redundant and they want to be paid for a meal break if they can’t leave the plant. Most of all they want to be treated as human beings - not a commodity to be tossed aside when no longer required. They want decent jobs."

AKO AOTEAROA WANTS MORE REFLECTIVE TEACHING

Director of Ako Aotearoa, the National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence, Dr Peter Coolbear will be presenting a paper tomorrow on how tertiary educators might become reflective practitioners. Dr Coolbear claims that tertiary teachers in general are not good at developing their teaching practice on a sound evidence base of learner benefit. He will be presenting Ako Aotearoa’s experience of the first round of both its National Project Fund and its Good Practice Publication Grants to suggest some ideas about how tertiary teachers might begin to break out of this bind.

The paper is part of this week’s national conference on tertiary teaching and learning being hosted at UCOL and funded by Ako Aotearoa. It is attended by delegates and speakers from universities, institutes of technology and polytechnics, and private providers from throughout New Zealand.

For the first time, the annual teaching conference is being held in conjunction with the education sector’s eFest, usually a stand-alone conference on the use of technology in tertiary education.

Conference Convenor, UCOL’s Janet Walke, says for delegates it is a unique opportunity to attend an event that combines the expertise and momentum behind two established education conferences. “It provides an excellent platform for active debate around excellence in teaching and the changing role of the educator,” she says.

More than 30 leading educators and researchers from throughout the country will speak and run workshops at the conference including Dr Lisa Emerson, the 2008 winner of the Prime Minister's Supreme Award for Excellence in Tertiary Teaching, Dr Emerson will close the conference tomorrow with a speech on her teaching philosophy which aims to treat each student as an individual and develop learning communities within all classes.

UK UNIVERSITIES FACE FINES FOR TOO MANY STUDENTS

British universities face multimillion pound fines after evidence suggested they broke a government-imposed cap on student numbers by up to 22,000 places after a 10 percent surge in applications.

Fears that thousands of well-qualified students would be prevented from starting a degree this year seem to have been avoided after universities defied an order to restrict places.

Official data, seen by the Guardian, reveals that as term started this week universities had accepted 35,000 more students than last September, despite an order that only 13,000 more be allowed. Vice-chancellors face being fined for every student admitted over the official limit.

There has been unprecedented pressure on the admissions systems this year with 60,000 extra applications, fuelled in part by older applicants seeking to do a degree during the recession. The last official figures show a 10% increase in students overall but a 19.5% rise among over-25s.

Ministers capped the number of extra places after discovering a £200m black hole in their university finances.

The decision opened up the debate over whether the government had abandoned its long-standing commitment to expand higher education.

Universities have been told that if they over-recruit their funding will be clawed back. But the government has not said how much the "fines" will be as it does not know the extent of over-recruiting or the costs it faces to finance the grants and loans of the extra places.

From Polly Curtis at the Guardian

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TEU Tertiary Update is published weekly on Thursdays and distributed freely to members of the Tertiary Education Union and others. You can subscribe to Tertiary Update by email or feed reader. Back issues are available on the TEU website. Direct inquiries should be made to Stephen Day, email: stephen.day@teu.ac.nz

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